Official Competition 2019

Syndrome IO

Art Union Marmelade I 2018 I 20'

SYNOPSIS

Three directors portray three characters in Saint Petersburg, their lives full of intensity and aggression. The camera fragments figures and spaces, pushes the bodies off screen, limits their possibilities for action. Only violence seems to lead from one room to another, seems to be able to connect the rooms, and in the end even to question the film fiction itself. It is a syndrome of a present.

BIOGRAPHY

Art Union Marmelade (Anastasia Braiko, Anastasia Veber y Egor Sevastyanov)

ART UNION MARMELADE is a collective formed by ANASTASIA BRAIKO, ANASTASIA VEBER and EGOR SEVASTYANOV. Together with other filmmakers, they are members of the St. Petersburg Union of New Filmmakers, Unionprotiv. Syndrome IO won an award at the prestigious Oberhausen Short Film Festival.

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Critical text

It is no coincidence that the film by Anastasia Braiko, Anastasia Veber and Egor Sevastyanov, produced at the St. Petersburg School of New Cinema, has been recognised in festivals like Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Its directors, the collective Art Union Marmelade, have managed to turn the production premises of a student film with non-professional actors into an intelligent, wild and subversive cinematographic device. The initial shot of Syndrome IO shows the con- gested face of a teenager in the moment that precedes the catharsis of violence. This drive, together with unbridled passionate love, forms a structural dialectic in which the story operates as a laboratory where the narrative code itself is experienced and tested. And while the body allows itself to be carried away by the Machiavellian incitements of a social system that also has the power to deconstruct it, Martynov’s beautiful and disturbing music plays. RAMÓN DEL BUEY

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